This week, Trump
decided to dispense with the pretense at decency and embrace one of the more
obvious attributes of fascism in general, and Nazism in particular. In an effort to seek scapegoats for economic
and international crises, Trump turned first to Latinos in the U.S. Now, in the wake of the terrorist attack on
Paris, he is turning his hate on a new target, American Muslims.

In a recent
interview, Trump declared that he would do “unthinkable” things to monitor
U.S. citizens on the basis of their religion.
Asked whether “registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form
of special identification that noted their religion” would be options, Trump
replied that these would all be options.

Suggesting that
American Muslims should carry a form of ID referencing their religion clearly
evokes the darkest moments of Nazi Germany and its persecution of German and
European Jews.

But the bigotry and
Islamophobia that this represents is nothing new for Trump and his
supporters. Months ago, an
audience member at one of Trump’s rallies said, “We have a problem in our
country, it’s called Muslims. We know
our current president is one”. Trump did
not take the decent approach of calling the man out for his Islamophobia, and
simply responded, “Right”.

The audience member
escalated, calling for ethnic cleansing when he said, “We have training camps
growing where they want to kill us. That’s
my question. When can we get rid of
them?”

To this, Trump replied,
“We’re going to be looking at that.”

So here we have the
spectacle of a presidential candidate, in a country dedicated to the notion of
inequality, to a separation of church and state, and to republican democracy,
saying that he will “look into” both a form of ID designed to distinguish
members of a religious community from the general population on the basis that
they constitute a threat to our country, and a policy of somehow “getting rid
of” members of that community, through unspecified means.

In addition to
preaching hatred, ignorance, and paranoia, these politicians are failing to
recognize the relationship between their own party’s behavior over time, and
particularly its promotion of an aggressive, imperial foreign policy, and the actual threats the U.S. faces.

Scapegoating U.S.
citizens of particular ethnic or religious groups is disgusting, wrong, and
commits the Republican Party to the abandonment of key laws and protections in
our country and on a path to committing some very dark deeds.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

For the second time in as many primary
debates, Hillary Clinton launched an attack on the notion of free public higher
education. Her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, has proposed a plan to make
public universities free, by way of reducing student debt and creating more
opportunities for would-be students in the U.S.

While Clinton has her own policies for
addressing student debt (and while Sanders’ policy prescriptions are imperfect),
she has mocked and attacked the principle of free public universities.
Her line of attack thus far—calculated to win cheap applause—has been to say
that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Donald Trump’s kids to go to
university.

There are, needless to say, some problems with
this line of reasoning. And the problems
with this reasoning shed light on an even larger problem, at least for those of
us resigned to seeing the Democratic Party as our best institutional tool at
the national level for trying to make the U.S. a more equal and just
society. Hillary Clinton, the candidate
who many want to lead that party into a national election next year, either
doesn’t understand something as elementary as a social contract and what makes
a public institution public, or else is seeking to undermine and un-do public
institutions.

At a first glance, there seems to be something
just and logical about claiming that the taxpayers—a term that brings to mind
middle class families—should pay to send Donald Trump’s kids to school. These “taxpayers,” after all, might very well
be struggling, and by his own admission, Donald Trump is a very, very rich man.

But Donald Trump is also a taxpayer. And based on his wealth, he is a taxpayer who
should be contributing enough to the public education system to pay not only
for his own kids, but for a great many other people’s kids to attend public
university for free under the kind of plan envisioned by Sanders.

That’s what a public good ought to be. A service—like university—provided at no cost
to members of society irrespective of their parents’ wealth through
contributions from the taxpayers. Needless
to say—although clearly Hillary Clinton does
need to hear this—those contributions are proportionate to the wealth of
individual taxpayers.

In the first debate, Clinton bragged about
working when she went to college, and said “I think it’s important for everyone
to have some part of getting this accomplished,” adding that she “would like to
see students work 10 hours a week.”

This demonstrates another series of misunderstandings
on Clinton’s part, in part about the cyclical nature of the social contract,
and in part about the changes in higher education that have occurred since she
was a student.

The notion of a cross-generational social
contract, that underpins the historic principles of free education and other
features of welfare states that enhance the lives of their citizens means that
people make the most substantial contributions to the maintenance of public
goods and institutions when they have the ability to do so. When they are younger or older, those
requirements wane, and then they are supported by older or younger generations
who have taken over as the primary economic contributors to the public welfare.

Therefore, although in a system of truly
public higher education (wherein the taxpaying public supports qualified students
to attend university at low or ideally no cost) students are not paying tuition
and fees to “have some part of getting this accomplished” (as Clinton elegantly
put it), they will, later in life, contribute towards the “free” education of
others.

Thus, everyone is playing their part, just at
different points in their lives. And if
Donald Trump’s kids were able to attend a public university for free, that
would be because their father was paying significantly, through his taxes, into
a system of public higher education, along with other taxpayers, whose
contributions would be proportional to their income and other earnings.

The second problem is with Clinton’s “I worked
through college, while walking uphill through snowstorms—both ways!”
comment. Using her experience from the
mid-1960s to make intelligent commentary on public policy 50 years later is
tin-eared and in this case more than a little silly.

When Clinton was a university student (at a
private university), tuition at the country’s preeminent system of higher
education, the University of California, was $0. Today, tuition at the University of
California runs at over $12,000, with an estimated total annual cost of over
$30,000. Hillary Clinton, in other
words, is speaking as a member of a generation who benefited tremendously from
a massive investment in truly public higher education.

So having benefited from a generous social
contract, and generations of taxpayers who invested in giving their generation
free access to the world’s best universities, and the opportunities and
economic advantages associated with that attendance, Clinton’s generation, and
politicians like Clinton, have kicked away the latter, and are asking today’s
generations of students to make significant contributions to paying their own
way at a time in their lives when they are economically vulnerable, and are
asking them to take on significant workloads.

I understand that in the eyes of many, there
is virtue associated with work. Work is
good for its own sake, and working while going to college is a sign of strength
and responsibility.

I also understand, as someone who has been
teaching university students for six years, that asking students to work
significant hours while they study is a really bad idea. Students become distracted, their studies
take a back seat, they become overwhelmed by the work, and they miss out on the
opportunity to take a few years of their lives to think and learn
systematically in an environment designed to foster and support critical
thinking. They miss out on opportunities
for research that will make them more competitive on the job market and more
proficient at the skills they are honing as they study. They will miss out on the opportunities to
associate with people from other places who have other perspectives. Asking students to stretch their finite
energies and time between work and study—particularly when we have, in the past
found ways to ensure that this didn’t have to be the case—undermines many of
the benefits associated with higher education.

Hillary Clinton is very clearly not
stupid. She knows how the social
contract works. She understands what
public institutions are. She must know
something about the experience of students in today’s poorly-funded and costly
public universities.

So I can only conclude, in light of her
comments, that she doesn’t support the traditional social contract between
generations, and doesn’t believe in truly public institutions.

That’s fine.
Those are legitimate if ultimately unfortunate and misguided political
positions. But Hillary Clinton, while
adopting these regressive positions, is casting herself as a leading
progressive, and is competing in the primary of a party ostensibly committed to
the defense of public institutions.

So Clinton’s attacks on public higher
education, her deceitful rhetoric, and her repudiation of the social contract,
are further evidence of her hypocrisy and further evidence that she is
advocating a right-wing approach to public policy that is the last thing the
U.S. needs at this stage. All those voters,
from whichever party, who are committed to public higher institutions, a fair
social contract between the generations, and public institutions at large,
should turn away from Clinton and the Republicans, and take a more serious look
at Bernie Sanders, the candidate who is unafraid to discuss the benefits of a
generous, healthy welfare state.

Senator Bernie Sanders has recently declared his
intention to make a speech explaining democratic socialism—the ideological and
policy framework underpinning his presidential campaign—to an American public
conditioned to see anything containing the word “socialism” as a threat to the
country’s way of life. Sanders’ speech
on Thursday will be a welcome addition to what has become a stale political
debate over the past decades, hemmed in by the policy dogmas associated with unchecked
capitalism and its mythical “free market”.

In the course of his campaign, Sanders has invoked
other countries that he argues practice forms of “democratic socialism,”
including Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
Central to his case has been the argument that far from being a
dangerous pipe-dream, democratic socialism represents a viable political
formation, which exists in other countries.

Noted U.S. historian Eric Foner, whose work has
involved recapturing long-hidden voices in U.S. history,
had some advice for Sanders as to how to discuss democratic socialism. He encouraged the Senator to drop Denmark and
“embrace our own American radical tradition…talk about our radical forebears
here in the United States.” Foner lists
the likes of Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Abby
Kelley and the various parties that have served as institutional vehicles for
radical political advancement in the United States.

Foner is on to something, inasmuch as Americans tend
to be xenophobic, and balk at the idea that they can learn something from other
parts of the world. From a rhetorical
standpoint, there is probably value in calling attention to this tradition of
radical or socialist thought in the United States.

But the approach that Foner advocates misses one crucial
thing. Sanders’ goal as a presidential
aspirant is to convince the public not simply that they can relate to the
ideology ostensibly at the heart of his campaign—and I would argue that what
Sanders is actually advocating is a form of moderate social democracy—but that
this is a system of organizing polities, economies, and societies which can
work and has worked.

For this reason, it is both helpful and important to
be able to invoke those societies—no matter the ways they might differ in size
or demographics or in political structure from the United States—which have
used different, and to some eyes radical, political principles in order to
create a society that is more equal, more just, more free than our own. Sanders
needs to be able to convince people of the fact that social welfare doesn’t
kill jobs, destroy industry, squash innovation, or make automatons of people.

So while invoking radicals of the American past who
helped our country to make progress in combatting social and economic
inequality is a good thing, it is equally if not more important to explain how
as a broad ideology, that would serve as the basis for policymaking in a
Sanders Administration, democratic socialism is something practical and
workable that has yielded tremendous benefits for a great many people in other
parts of the world.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Shaped as it was by yesterday’s
horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris, tonight’s Democratic Party primary
debate exposed the impoverished state of coherent, intelligent, and
forward-looking thought about international affairs in the Democratic Party.While none of the three candidates offers the
same toxic mix of casual and catastrophic violence, xenophobia, and rank
ignorance as the GOP, they had nothing like a coherent, progressive,
imaginative policy agenda for thinking about and acting on the major challenges
facing a world wracked by violence.

There were, however, substantial
differences in the ways in which the three candidates reflected on events,
viewed recent history, and deliberated about how to contend with global
terrorism.

Clinton invited us to think about
history and invoked a history of U.S. “victimization” by history.But a truly historical perspective would ask
us to think about why the U.S. has been attacked over the years, and whether
our behavior has created some of these threats.They did not, after all, emerge from nowhere.In contrast, Sanders invoked the history of
U.S. efforts at regime change around the world, and connected these to
terrorism and instability.I know whose
grasp of historical evidence and critical thinking would earn the better grade
in my history class!

Martin O’Malley was similarly
disjointed in attempting to outline an international policy agenda.He identified the lack of human intelligence
as central to the countless failures of U.S. foreign policy making in the past
years.That is incredibly naïve, and
overlooks the far more important role of a dysfunctional worldview and an
over-mighty security state in mangling our ability to engage rationally with
the world.

Nonetheless, no candidate was as
frightening as Clinton when it came to articulating a foreign policy, not least
because of her record.We know Clinton
as a supporter of the illegal, immoral, and disastrous war in Iraq.We know her as the Obama administration’s
strongest civilian advocate for regime change and war in Libya, Syria, and
elsewhere in the Middle East.We know
her as a reactionary who, as Secretary of State defended dictators and
autocrats against the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring and helped to
ensure, through her defense of them, that those uprisings were failed or
mangled in many instances.We know her
as a defender of unconscionable Israeli colonialism that endangers the lives of
Palestinian subjects and Israeli citizens alike.We know her as a defender of Morocco’s
indefensible colonialism in Western Sahara.And we know her as the public servant who attacked as a traitor Edward
Snowden, who shed light on the terrorism and abuse of the security state she
has helped to enlarge.

Tonight’s debate offered further
evidence of the dangerous nature of Clinton’s worldview.She blamed the rise of ISIS on the Iraqi
government and the Assad government in Syria.Neither of those governments are blameless.But to omit mentioning that the event most
responsible for the creation of ISIS was the war in Iraq that she voted to
authorize, and then never critiqued except along managerial lines, is
appalling.

Clinton also referred to former
Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi as the “Muslim Brotherhood president” in Egypt
who was “installed”.The reality, as
Clinton should recall since she was Secretary of State at the time, is that
Morsi won an election, and was “elected”, not “installed”.She might not care for the Muslim
Brotherhood.But the choice of president
was Egyptians, and not hers.But I can
understand her reluctance, given the effort she expended in undermining Egypt’s
democratic uprisings and defending the dictator Mubarak’s regime in the name of
“stability”, small comfort to the Egyptians who perished or whose rights were
extinguished under his 30 year regime.

When asked how to confront ISIS and
other instances of terror, Clinton invoked the Authorization for Use of
Military Force passed after 9/11, suggesting that it was sufficient to
authorize a president’s military response to ISIS.This is deeply disturbing.AUMF gave Bush the authorization to “use all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks
that occurred on September 11, 2001”.

ISIS is in some regard connected to
9/11, inasmuch as the Bush Administration used it to gain public support for
their invasion of Iraq and lied about connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein in order to persuade irresponsible and frankly ignorant representatives
like Hillary Clinton to write them a blank, bipartisan check for the war that
created ISIS.

But the idea that a 2001 authorization
for the pursuit of those individuals who attacked the U.S. 14 years ago can
grant the president the authority to wage war against any terrorist group in
2015 is absurd, makes a mockery of the law, and demonstrates how quick Clinton
would be to abuse Bush-era laws and take the U.S. into new wars.

Clinton’s foreign policy record should
be subjected to far more critical scrutiny by both Sanders and O’Malley, and
the media.

Sanders was less hesitant than in
previous debates to criticize Hillary Clinton, and having identified her vote
for the Iraq war as a mistake with dire consequences, he also called attention
to her long-term ties to Wall Street.

Clinton took umbrage, and whined about
having her integrity impugned.Sanders
must have used a microscope to locate and question her integrity, given her
career of hypocritical, regressive, flip-flopping, neo-conservative
war-mongering, and sympathy for the irresponsible financial industry.

Sensing that she was on the defensive,
Clinton actually went so far as to invoke 9/11 as the reason for Wall Street’s
support for her campaigns over the years to the tune of more than $35 million
(her total haul of corporate money is far higher).

Hillary Clinton once again revealed
herself as the most right-wing of the three candidates when it came to social
welfare.She refused to acknowledge
healthcare as the right that it is in much of the world, as opposed to the
privilege that the over-priced and under-performing healthcare sector is the
U.S.

She also proved her regressive
credentials when it came to higher education.The moderator criticized Bernie Sanders’ plan to make public higher
education free by citing a 63% graduation rate across colleges.This low rate, the moderator suggested, was a
good reason not to “waste” money on making that education free

What Sanders should have said but
didn’t is that a significant reason why a large number of college attendees
have difficulty in completing their degrees is the high costs and massive debt
associated with higher education.Many
students drop out because of this debt, and others leave their degrees
unfinished as their college careers drag out over too many years because of the
need to work as they study.

Investing in higher education, and
making it free—as it was in many states for many years—is a good way to equip
students with the tools to finish their degrees and emerge unencumbered by
crippling debt.

For the second debate running, Hillary
Clinton angled for cheap applause, framing her opposition to free public higher
education as an opposition to taxpayers paying for Donald Trump’s kids to go to
college for free.

But the very definition of public
higher education is a system in which ALL students, irrespective of their
parents’ wealth, attend college for free, supported by the taxpayers at large,
who pay into that system according to their wealth.Until the likes of Ronald Reagan came along,
this was the model in California, home of the country’s—and arguably the
world’s—best system of public higher education.

There were important moments during the
domestic policy sections of the debate.But I was most struck by the initial, lengthy foreign policy discussion.

It left me disheartened.The Democratic Party has ceased to be—if it
ever was—an entity which has anything resembling a moral or coherent world
view, any sense of history, or an ability to hit back at the narrative our
security state has constructed about the place of the U.S. in the wider
world.The Party is increasingly being
pulled to the left in economic terms, and this will be to the long-term benefit
of our public.But none of that
progressive momentum has filtered into thinking about international affairs,
institutions, or innovations, and I fear for our country and our world.

In the past week, events in Beirut,
Paris, and elsewhere have illustrated some of the dangers—regularly on display,
often un-reported—that define the lives of too many people in the world.They have illustrated the inadequacy of our
global institutions, our policy frameworks, and our leadership to address our
global crisis with anything resembling long-term or thoughtful
policymaking.The U.S. must play a role
in whatever changes occur in this sphere.And while the Republican Party offers nothing but naked violence, I see
little better coming from a morally and intellectually impoverished Democratic
Party based on tonight’s debate.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.